Month: December 2016

Want to make a pop-up book? Who doesn’t? But understanding how to fold and cut your paper to get the right effect can be befuddling, even to a seasoned book artist. Luckily, we’ve got The Pocket Paper Engineer to help us out on that front.

Unlike many picture-based pop-up how-to books, this one has pages that fold out to show you exactly what needs to happen from the front and back of the pop-out in order to make it work. If you’re a tactile learner, this is your pop-up paradise.

Pop-ups make great additions to holiday cards too, so even if you’re not usually the sort to get all in a flutter over folding paper, this could be a fun foray into something new.

If you’re a punk rocker, art school kid, or some other genre-defying cool person, you probably already know what a zine is.

For the rest of you losers (just kidding), here’s the skinny:

Zines are handmade mini-magazines (the term is an abbreviation of fanzine) that feature content curated by their makers. This could be original poetry, a collection of photographs, a comic you wrote about this one weird thing that happened to you, once… anything, really. And that’s the beauty of zines. They can be about whatever one deems zine-worthy, and anyone with basic photocopy machine prowess and a stapler can make them. Truly, zines keep the public in publication.

So in order to support this democratic form of publishing, as well as celebrate and promote the work of our creative community, the library will be hosting an opening reception showcasing zines created by this fall’s Writer’s Craft students.

The reception will be held Thursday,December 15th from 12-1PM, right here in the library.

So come enjoy some light refreshments and see what these cool cats are passionate about. Who knows, maybe you’ll finally meet someone who shares your burning love for Trompe L’ Oeil or your deep-rooted vendetta against Trump L’President. (Although, let’s be honest, the latter ain’t really all that hard to find, around here.)

According to a new Stanford study, students are having a difficult time differentiating fact from fiction as they are constantly barraged with media from varying sources, The Wall Street Journal reports here. Furthermore, the Media Insight Group reveals in their 2015 study that by the age of 18, as many as 88% of their survey respondents regularly get new from Facebook and other social media sources.

So, there is a lot of misinformation out there, as we all know. And being “information literate” or “media literate” requires us to be vigilant in fact checking and vetting our sources.

Luckily, there are some resources you can consult to give you a hand. For example, Melissa Zimdar, Ph.D., an assistant professor of communication and media at Merrimack College is compiling a list of “False, Misleading, Clickbait-y, and Satirical “News” Sources” that you can review here (it’s a work in progress). This page also includes some tips for analyzing news sources which is very helpful.

For more reading on this topic, check out this list compiled by a group of librarians: fake-news-bad-news-evaluation-resources of articles about the issue. And as ever, feel free to talk to your librarian, Elsa, who is always happy to commiserate and help you navigate the sometimes treacherous waters of the news.

Below is a link to a video put out by a Swedish fact-checking organization called Viral Examiner, or Viralgranskaren about a false news article about the reason for a Christmas light ban. It’s an example of viral outrage in response to misinformation.